——耶鲁大学莎士比亚专家大卫·司格特·卡斯顿教授访谈录

内容摘要：大卫·司格特·卡斯顿博士是耶鲁大学英语系资深教授、莎士比亚和英国文学研究领域的知名专家，曾主编《莎士比亚研究指南》、《新莎士比亚研究指南》和5卷本的《牛津英国文学大词典》等。在本次访谈录中，卡斯顿教授就困扰学界的关于莎士比亚的政治观、宗教观、叙事手法、悲剧观等热点问题阐释了自己的观点。卡斯顿教授认为，莎士比亚的政治观主要表现在对人类不平等现象的关注，这一关注至今仍具有重要意义。虽然我们目前还无法完全了解莎士比亚的信仰，但是可以肯定的是，宗教隐含在他的每一部剧本中，赋予他的作品深刻的社会意义。莎士比亚的叙事，是对人类理解力的本真形式的阐释，他的剧作给我们提供了人类怎样依靠故事来理解生存的含义。莎士比亚作品中的悲剧意识在于揭示了人类的受难情结、人类残忍的可怕性及其无法控制的后果。面对国际上长期以来存在的关于莎士比亚的身份、抄袭、色情性以及哈姆雷特人物的非人道性等指控，卡斯顿教授旗帜鲜明地驳斥了这些曲解。卡斯顿教授认为，否认莎士比亚的身份是一种学术势利的行为；在创作中，莎士比亚的确借鉴了前人的作品，但却达到了前人无法企及的程度；性爱是人类生活的重要部分，莎士比亚作品中表现性爱豪不奇怪；T.S 艾略特所指控的哈姆莱特邪恶的观点有失片面，哈姆雷特只将坏人送向死亡。在访谈的最后部分，卡斯顿教授指出了在全球化时代研究莎士比亚的意义、莎士比亚产业化的毒害性，并且肯定了中国学界对莎士比亚的不同解读。卡斯顿教授认为，在全球化的今天，每个国家和民族都有权利根据自己的文化，对莎士比亚做出特定的解读，法学家也可以对莎士比亚进行跨学科研究，这是莎士比亚永恒性和全球性的重要表现。

Part One. Kastan’s Research on Shakespeare

Tian Junwu: Thank you for accepting my interview of you, Professor Kaston. Before the formal interview, I’d like to ask you a general question concerning your achievements in Shakespeare Study, including awards and honours that you received in the past decades.

David Kaston: It is my pleasure to have an interview with a Chinese scholar. I have written a number of books on Shakespeare, served as general editor of three series of Shakespeare editions, including the Arden Shakespeare, produced scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, part one, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, and edited various anthologies of criticism on Shakespeare and other literary figures, including the five volume Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. I have been fortunate enough to have received various honors for my work, some awards for individual books and articles, invitations to give lecture series at a number of universities, and opportunities to teach as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at universities in Copenhagen, Budapest, London, and Paris.

Tian Junwu: In the book Political Shakespeare (1999), I happened to glance at one of your articles titled as “Is There A Class in This (Shakespearean) Text ? According to my understanding, it is about Shakespeare’s political ideas, the topic of which Chinese scholars are interested at. So, can you give us a detailed illustration of Shakespeare’s political ideas?

David Kaston: This article was in large part about Shakespeare’s understanding of what we would call class differences and the manifest disparities of wealth and power that follow from these. I was interested in what the effect was of making these visible on the stage. What are the political implications, for example, of making kingship something that an actor can perform? Does the fact that social rank can be enacted on stage suggest that class positions in reality are not essential facts of human existence but positions that are constructed and changeable? In various plays, characters call attention to these poignant inequalities, hoping that somehow these can be redressed to “show the heavens more just,”（King Lear,108） as one character says, but the utopian desire that is articulated is never fulfilled. Still, the plays reveal and make poignant a world of inequality that is still a social fact and a political issue in our world, and which, the plays suggest, need not be so.

Tian Junwu: In 2001, you published an article called Shakespeare and Narrative, which is selected in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language---A Guide. I guess this article studies the narrative form of Shakespeare’s plays. What are your unique ideas concerning the narrative features of Shakespeare’s drama?

David Kaston: Narrative is, in an obvious sense, the literary form that implies not only a story but also a storyteller. Drama, on the other hand, might be said to be the form of storytelling that has no teller. It depends upon enactment rather than narration. The complex interaction of characters on stage enables the story to be told in language and action. Nonetheless, narrative is for Shakespeare a device for imparting information to characters and to audiences, as well as a central thematic focus of the plays. Shakespeare shows us characters recalling experiences, spreading rumors, giving evidence, telling lies, expressing feelings, relating dreams, etc.; that is, Shakespeare shows us characters engaged in various forms of what is arguably the single most characteristic human quality—the act of storytelling. Narrative, Shakespeare shows us, is an essential form of human apprehension, and the plays give evidence of how we depend on stories to make sense of our lives.

Tian Junwu: I hear that you will have a new book published soon, that is Shakespeare and Religion. Religion is greatly related to literature, and Shakespeare’s works are no exception. Can you briefly tell us how Shakespeare’s religious outlooks influenced his drama creation?

David Kaston: The argument of the book is that we do not know anything about the particular form of Shakespeare’s belief. The historical record is too thin to say confidently what he believed, and the religion of the plays can only confidently be said to belong to the fictional worlds rather than to their creator. But if we cannot determine what Shakespeare believed--or even if he believed—unquestionably religion saturates his plays, supplying their foremost terms of interest and significance. Religion provides the fundamental vocabulary in which characters express themselves and are presented to us to be understood. We can see in the plays Shakespeare’s profound awareness of the centrality of religion in his England, his attentiveness to the fundamental, if often fiercely debated, terms in which people in his time sought to understand their own lives and their relationship to their families, communities, and God. But how he experienced any of this personally we don’t know, however much we want to. He remains for us, as the poet Thomas Hardy called him, a “Bright baffling soul . . . Leaving no intimate word or personal trace outside the artistry / Of his personal dream.” (Hardy 1976:439-40)

Tian Junwu: It seems that although Shakespeare wrote many plays, he never systematically voiced his ideas on play writing. But this does not stop critics from investigating his play theories. I find that you have written an article called “A Rarity Most Beloved: Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy.” Is this an article about Shakespeare’s theory of tragedy?

David Kaston: I think you are right. Any idea about his theoretical understanding must come from a reading of the plays themselves. There are no theoretical documents to which to turn, and I don’t think Shakespeare writes the tragedies driven by a fully developed theoretical conception of the genre. Nonetheless, a coherent and compelling sense of tragedy develops as he writes the various plays, each pushing his understanding of the nature and the possibilities of the form. Tragedy, for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering, and as he writes in that mode the successive plays reveal an ever more profound formal acknowledgment of their desolating controlling logic. In its endings, the exhausted survivors will inevitably seek to convince themselves that the tragedy has not only passed but also that its causes have been banished and the experience has at least taught worthy lessons. But the plays insist that tragedy is something far less reassuring. Tragedy tells us that human cruelty is terrible and its consequences are not easily contained. This is not to say that the vision of such a world where suffering is seemingly inevitable and where nothing is offered as effective compensation or consolation is true; for Shakespeare, genres are always hypothetical and provisional. It is only to say that such a vision is what Shakespeare understands as tragic.

Part 2. Shakespeare in the controversy

Tian Junwu: Just as the authorship of Dream of the Red Chambers is an everlasting topic of Chinese scholars, questions about Shakespeare’s identity never stopped in the world. In the late 19^th century, a so-called “anti-Strafordian” movement even won the support of some famous writers and scholars like Mark Twine and Sigmund Freud. They tried to find evidences to show that Shakespeare was not the author of these works. Even as recently as 2009, a critic named Rene Weiss again mentioned the authorship of Shakespeare by publishing an article called “Was there a real Shakespeare?” in the journal Textual Practice. As far as the authorship of Shakespeare is concerned, there are various ideas about the real identity of the man who wrote the 37 plays and 154 sonnets. In her book The Philosophy of Shakespeare’s Plays Unfolded, Delia Bacon tried to prove the idea that the author of Shakespeare's plays might be France Bacon. Other scholars hold that Christopher Marlowe might be the authorship of Shakespeare’s works. You yourself also published an article called “To think these trifles some-thing: Shakespeare Playbooks and the Claims of Authorship” in the journal Shakespeare Studies (2008). What is your comment on the ideas concerning the authorship of Shakespeare?

David Kaston: No one until early in the nineteenth century ever suggested that anyone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him. There are many references by his own contemporaries recognizing him as their author. The argument that he didn’t write them is based on two things: 1) a snobbery that refuses to recognize that the plays could be written by anyone who wasn’t educated at university or raised at court; and 2) a misunderstanding of the actual conditions of playwrighting in the period, leading them to take as evidence of some conspiracy things that are perfectly normal, such as the fact that no scripts of the plays are mentioned in his will. I have no doubt that Shakespeare did write the works attributed to him.

Tian Junwu: Besides the authorship disputes, over the centuries, Shakespeare has also been accused as a copycat, a thief, a plagiarist on grounds that he pirated plots, phrases, lines of verse, and even entire poems of other writers. It is said that Shakespeare never invented a story, he just adapted and copied plots from historical books or old stories. Sometimes he worked from the stories of comparatively recent Italian writers, such as Boccaccio, or quoted his contemporary Christopher Marlowe. What is your comment to these accusations of Shakespeare?

David Kaston: The criticism seems to me to miss the point. T. S. Eliot said: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” (Eliot1934 :125)Shakespeare does take plots, characters, occasional lines from earlier writers, but then he turns them always into “something better” than the text in which found them, and into something that it is uniquely his own.

Tian Junwu :In China, influenced by Marxist’s overpraise of the dramatist, Shakespeare enjoyed a higher prestige as the master of Renaissance and even the mouthpiece of the proletariat class.Any article saying the negative aspect of Shakespeare is not easy to be published. But in his native country as well as in the world, scholars never stop finding the negative aspects of Shakespeare’s works. For example, some scholars point out the pornographic features of Venus and Adonis, other scholars cite Shakespeare's sonnets as evidence of the bard’s possible bisexuality: namely homosexuality and heterosexuality. In his Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns (2006), Pauline Kiernan pointed out nearly all the filthy words and sentences used by Shakespeare. Are these studies misunderstanding of Shakespeare’s works or did Shakespeare’s works really have the filthy features?

David Kaston: Shakespeare is interested in people as they are rather than as they imagine themselves to be. Sexual desire and activity are part of what we are, so it is unsurprising to find that his language at times recognizes this. I don’t think, however, that we can assume that what he writes about in any of his works is a necessary reflection of what he himself was or did. We can’t work backwards from the writing to find the man. If something happens in a play, there is no reason to think it happened to Shakespeare. And if someone expresses a feeling there is no reason to think it is his own. That is the very point of the imagination: that it allows writers to invent things that didn’t experience. Can the jealous Othello, or Leontes, be taken as evidence that Shakespeare was himself jealous or merely as proof that Shakespeare was capable sympathetically of imagining jealousy? The range of human emotion and experience that Shakespeare portrays would allow almost anything to be claimed for Shakespeare himself, and indeed almost everything has been claimed about him—in terms of his occupational history, sexual orientation, emotions, politics, and beliefs. Reading fiction as autobiography misconstrues the basic idea of imagination.

Tian Junwu: In the eyes of some western scholars, even Hamlet the play was a failure and even Hamlet the man was not a tragic hero as he was once regarded to be. For example, in his "Hamlet and His Problems", T. S. Eliot declared the play an artistic failure, as Shakespeare failed to make proper arrangement of incidents and impose a dramatic order. He pointed out that the play was the longest and there were superfluous and inconsistent scenes with the versification being variable. Eliot also said that Hamlet the man was an evil man who sent three innocent people and his two friends to death without any sense of guilt. What is your idea to the negative criticism of Hamlet the play and Hamlet the hero?

David Kaston: I think Eliot gets one thing right: Hamlet does send people to their deaths with little if any remorse. Think of how matter-of-fact he is about the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his friends from university. But Eliot assumes that Shakespeare didn’t realize this, that this is a mark of the play’s failure, rather than, as I would take it, of its very purpose. Hamlet, it seems to me, is a play in large part about a character’s desire to be moral but his inability to fully understand what that might mean. It isn’t entirely his own fault: the world of the play is a confusing one where appearances seem always to be deceptive. But Hamlet’s response to this is too often to get frustrated by this fact and move to some certainty about other’s motives that allows him to judge them. Still, what Hamlet might have been is more appealing than what he becomes: someone too much like the other images of conventional revengers like Laertes, and Fortinbras rather than Hamlet the more subtle and complex human being whom Ophelia terms the “courtier,” “soldier,” and “scholar”.

Part 3. Shakespeare Study in the Context of Globalization

Tian Junwu: In spite of the incessant questionings about the authorship of Shakespeare and the accusation of his plagiarism and eroticism, Shakespeare’s works have been tried-and-true, and Shakespearean Study has become one of the important research fields in the world. What, do you think, is the universal charm that made Shakespeare’s works withstand the test of time?

David Kaston: It is remarkable. The plays manage, in spite of the fact they were written over four hundred years ago, still to serve as our most articulate and moving voice of what it means to be human, in all of the beauty, complexity, and sometimes horror of what that might mean. How it is possible that they do this, when the works of none of his contemporaries comes close to performing a similar role, is impossible to answer. You can call it “genius,” and it is, but that is a mystification.

Tian Junwu: Anston Bosman wrote an article called Shakespeare and Globalization, which was selected in The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. This article may let us think Shakespeare’s relationship with today’s globalization. How Shakespeare’s works helped to promote the process of globalization? And how can we study Shakespeare’s works in the new process of globalization?

David Kaston: It is a remarkable fact that Shakespeare has become a “global” figure, and he has been translated into more languages and is performed and taught in more countries than any other author. How this happened is complex. No doubt in part because in the nineteenth century the expanse of the British Empire determined Shakespeare’s availability in many parts of the world. But that isn’t explanation enough. Shakespeare didn’t have to take root as he has in the native soil. But different cultures have, for the most part, recognized in Shakespeare something that seemingly transcends ideology, especially a nationalistic one, even though he is so aware of how ideology works in his own country and time.

Tian Junwu :In China, the Government is taking great efforts to develop culture as an industry. I also find that in Britain and America, there has also appeared a so-called Shakespeare industry, that is: theatrical, cinematographic and TV stagings of Shakespeare, commercial exploitation of the playwright’s image and those of the characters that he invented; the usage of the above-mentioned images in gift production (e.g., on T-shirts). Do you think that Shakespeare industry is a popularization of Shakespeare or a vulgarization of Shakespeare?

 David Kaston: Much of it is a vulgarization, though probably harmless enough. It testifies to a widely held cultural belief that Shakespeare matters, but that belief is often merely notional—and certainly much easier to have than a serious encounter with the plays themselves. But commercial exploitation has been going on for a long time. By the middle of the eighteenth-century, Shakespeare had become a cult figure in England, and a tourist industry developed in Stratford-upon-Avon in England, which became not merely a popular tourist destination but almost a pilgrimage site, at which items were offered for sale as relics, like the small splinters of a mulberry tree, which, it was claimed, Shakespeare had planted in his garden. If there is vulgarization, it stems from the fact that the “Shakespeare industry” doesn’t demand any real knowledge of or interest in the plays themselves. Too often and for too many people, a coffee mug with Shakespeare’s picture on it is the evidence of a recognition of his importance rather than a serious engagement with what he wrote.

Tian Junwu:In his Shakespeare in China, Murray J. Levith criticized the way the Chinese scholars studied Shakespeare: “The Chinese have mostly appropriated and adapted the playwright for their own purposes. They have dressed the Bard in various Chinese opera styles, forced him to be an apologist for Marxism-Leninism, celebrated his clunkers, neglected several of his masterpieces, excised sex, religion and contrary politics from his texts, added to them, and at times simplified, corrupted, or misunderstood his characters and themes. Perhaps more than any other nation, China has used a great artist to forward its own ideology rather than meet him on his ground.” (Levith 2004:137As a distinguished Shakespeare scholar, do you agree with Murray’s ideas? If this is truly the case, then what advice will you give to Chinese Shakespeare scholars, so as to help them study Shakespeare in a way accepted by the international society?

David Kaston: I do not know Chinese scholarship well enough to comment, since too little of it has been translated into English, and I, unfortunately, am unable to read it in the original. But every culture seems to me to have, at times, used Shakespeare for its own purposes, which more often than not were far from anything Shakespeare could have intended or imagined. This doesn’t seem to me necessarily a bad thing, as it is the mark of Shakespeare’s remarkable ability both to provoke interest and to absorb concerns of other communities and later ages. No engagement with any aspect of the past can be unmediated by the interests of the present; there must always be a dialogue between the two to enable the past to become part of our present. But my argument has always been to be sure it is in fact truly a dialogue: that we should listen as carefully as we can to the voices of the past to prevent our readings from merely being projections of our own concerns.

Tian Junwu :  Nowadays , interdisciplinary study has become an inevitable  trend. Influenced by the study of law and literature sponsored by Richard Posner, Shakespeare and law is becoming a new research field internationally, and scholars of both law and literature joined in the interdisciplinary research. As far as I know, there have been two interational conferences on Shakespeare and law held in both Warwick University and Chicago University. How do you think of the interdisciplinary Shakespeare study, especially the study joined by law researchers?

David Kaston: Literature inevitably invites forms of interdisciplinarity because literary texts, both as verbal constructs and as material texts, cannot be isolated from the world in which they are written, produced, and consumed. Literature both requires a context in which it is written and read, and inevitably alters that context; and scholars have interestingly connected the internal, aesthetic structures of literary texts to the wider cultural environments which motivate and sustain them. Law and Literature has become one of these areas of connection, an interesting subfield, which unsurprisingly has often focused on Shakespeare. To the degree that this focus explores Shakespeare's interest in legal concepts and practices, it is in fact a kind of historical scholarship, not different in kind from other historical interests (say, religion or politics) which can be seen to mark the plays. Shakespeare does seem to be interested in ideas, for example, of justice or of equity,  though I would say less as a systematic legal thinker than as someone who understands how fundamental these ideas are to human social imaginings. I am not sure a practicing lawyer would learn much about the law from reading Shakespeare, but might well learn much about the human beings who make it and depend upon it. Shakespeare does seem to understand that too often the law serves the interests of the powerful.  Famously, there is the line in 2 Henry VI, where a commoner in frustration says: "Let's kill all the lawyers,"(Henry 6, 142) and even King Lear, once he has given over his authority, grimly notes that in the face of wealth and power, "the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks."(King Lear, 193) But these of course are dramatic characters, not spokesmen for Shakespeare.

Tian Junwu: Thank you again for your excellent remarks about Shakespeare. They will be of great importance for Shakespeare scholars of both China and the world to have new recognition of the everlasting bard.

David Kaston: Your questions were both extremely intelligent and challenging to answer. If you need more or any clarifications, I will be happy to provide it. I thank you again for the honor of asking me to do the interview. I hope you enjoy your Fulbright visit in Yale.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, Williams. King Lear, ed. Burton Raffel &Harold Bloom, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007

Shakespeare, William. Henry The Sixth, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009

Thomas Hardy. The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gilbson, London: Macmillan, 1976

Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, London: Methen &Co. Ltd,1934

Levith, Murray J. Shakespeare in China, London: Continuum, 2004

          原载《外国文学研究》2012年第2期